Some funny items from David Langford's Ansible website (
www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/SF-Archives/Ansible/ ) regarding Atwood's stance on sci fi:
Quote:Patrick Gale's review of the new Margaret Atwood novel admires her `gleeful inventiveness' in imagining unheard-of wonders like `rats genetically spliced to snakes' or `pain-free chickens developed to produce only multiple breasts', yet deftly avoids calling this sc**nce f*ct**n: `In Oryx And Crake she makes a welcome return to fantasy. She would probably chuckle at that and murmur "if only" for, like The Handmaid's Tale, it is less a fantasy than an imaginative projection with a rational foundation in current facts.' Gale's other acceptable code phrase for the genre that dares not speak its name is `dystopian myth'. (Waterstone's Books Quarterly)
Margaret Atwood explains the vast gulf between our world and hers: `Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen.' (Guardian interview, 26 April)
SF authors may be storytellers, but don't count as novelists: `Contemporary novelists rarely write about science or technology. Margaret Atwood tackles both -- and more -- in one of the year's most surprising novels.' (The Economist, 3-9 May)
As a service to the editor's sanity, further outbreaks of Margaret Atwood have been censored. Oh, all right, just the one. Science fiction, as opposed to what she writes, is distinguished by `talking squids in outer space.' (BBC1 Breakfast News)
Stephen Baxter on Margaret Atwood's latest dismissive definition of sf, `talking squids in outer space': `Yikes, it's all my fault then; I did have talking squids in outer space, in my novel Time. Get a life, woman!' Jeff VanderMeer adds: `I do agree that the disreputable "talking squid in outer space" subgenre is giving sf a bad name. On the other hand, talking squid in a fantasy or postmodern fantasy story are not only acceptable -- they're expected! At least, by me.'
Max (Jennifer Government) Barry is yet another author who defines sf by futuristic gadgetry and regards this with Atwood-like alarm: `I had the idea for a story set in an ultra-capitalist world for a long time. But I didn't want to write a science-fiction book with laser guns and flying cars. I was more interested in writing a social fiction: taking the world we live in now and tweaking it a bit.' (Orbit Ezine 60) [DH] Of course no sf author could create that kind of thing. The Observer's reviewer agreed: `The point of the dystopian satire, of course -- as opposed to pure science-fiction -- is that its imagined world is both recognisable and chillingly possible ...' (27 July)
Margaret Atwood's careful rejection of the sf label was rewarded on 15 Aug, when Oryx and Crake made the Booker Prize longlist.
Joe J. of Waterstone's in Edinburgh took wicked liberties with Oryx and Crake: `Guess who sold a pile of them from his sf table? Interestingly, several of our regulars picked up Atwood and Gibson's Pattern Recognition at the same time. So a "literary" author who, of course, doesn't write sf and an sf author who has just turned out a book which is not actually sf.... God moves in mysterious ways, but books move at right angles to god. Next month we had Jennifer Government on our front shelves ... not treated or categorized as sf, despite being The Space Merchants for the No Logo generation. Sold a few, but not many. I read it, put a capsule review on it and displayed it on our SF Recommends stand. Well, golly, it went and sold far more than it did when it was at the front of the store, prominently displayed in new fiction. Know your audience as a bookseller, even when the publisher doesn't.'
Margaret Atwood reached the six-strong Booker Prize shortlist with her undeniably (except by her) sf novel Oryx and Crake. She has been nominated five times and won the 2000 prize for The Blind Assassin. One major firm of UK bookies listed her as favourite, with odds of 2-1.
<i>Edited by: AlphSeeker at: 10/20/03 9:28 am
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